Jeremy seemed bewildered the first day that Anthony-James Green arrived at his door to help him prepare for the SAT. At that point, Green had been working as a private SAT tutor for six years and had seen this deer-in-the-headlights look before.A conscientious student, Jeremy was a junior who loved science and got mostly A’s. It had never seemed like a stretch that someday he’d go to college. Then the results of his first SAT arrived, casting a shadow on his future.His scores were so low, he was unlikely to get into any college, except the few that didn’t consider any admissions tests at all. With 990 out of 2400 (this was the old SAT with a maximum score of 2400; as of 2016, the new SAT is scored out of 1600 points), Jeremy’s scores lagged across the board: in English, math, and writing.Green gave Jeremy a pep talk and explained his proven strategy for getting kids to raise their scores, no matter how bad they were: daily practice, focusing on knowledge gaps, and building one skill at a time. Green helped Jeremy identify his weaknesses: he didn’t know arithmetic; he didn’t understand decimals; his understanding of punctuation was spotty. Over the course of nine months, Jeremy began filling in these specific holes in his education.
The secret to improving SAT scores
